Nvidia launch Fermi-Class Quadro cards at SIGGRAPH 2010

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Nvidia has used the SIGGRAPH 2010 conference to launch a new class of Quadro graphics cards aimed at the professional market.

The Quadro 4000, Quadro 5000, and Quadro 6000 all use Nvidia’s latest technology by incorporating the Fermi GPU architecture. Nvidia claims that 3D applications see a 5x performance increase, and computational simulation benefits from an 8x increase with Fermi-Class Quadro cards compared to a CPU-only solution.

In real terms the Fermi cards are capable of processing 1.3 billion triangles per second, and take advantage of Nvidia’s Scalable Geometry Engines (SGE) and Application Acceleration Engines (AXE). High-precision computing is where Nvidia wants these cards used and has included Error Correction Codes (ECC) memory and IEEE double-precision floating point performance for that reason.

These cards aren’t cheap, but then they are for use in professional areas such as medical imaging, computational fluid dynamics, and finite element analysis. The prices for the three cards are as follows:

Quadro 4000 (2GB GDDR5 and 256 CUDA cores) – $1,199

Quadro 5000 (2.5GB GDDR5 and 352 CUDA cores) – $2,249

Quadro 6000 (6GB GDDR5 and 448 CUDA cores)- $4,999

Nvidia has also announced the Quadro Plex 7000 array for $14,500 offering multiple GPUs as a complete system solution.

Both the Quadro 4000 and 5000 are available immediately while the Quadro 6000 and Plex 7000 are due in the fall.

Nvidia has also produced a range of videos and uploaded them to YouTube showing the kind of computational work these new Quadro cards are suitable for. We’ve included a few of them below, but you can checkout the rest at the press release link below:

While gamers can pay $500 for their Fermi GTX 480 graphics cards, the professionals pay 3x to 5x that price. But in return they are getting a card that is capable of more precision processing with the memory and floating point capabilities to handle the most detailed of computational models. When you’re talking about medical imaging and fluid dynamic research a $2,500 graphics card is small change to companies working in those fields.

Gamers and standard desktop machines just don’t need that power. It can also be argued that due to the focus on console gaming nowadays PC gamers really don’t need the high-end cards available today. Most games are a port from the Xbox 360 or PS3 which, while cutting edge a few years ago have been surpassed by the latest hardware from both ATI and Nvidia. Such is the relentless technology development cycle even these new Quadro cards will be classed as outdated three years from now.